


rib line

by meatmarket



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:35:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23177815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meatmarket/pseuds/meatmarket
Summary: Johnny postures some more and tips double the usual, flirting the name out of the waitress. Jaehyun doesn’t point out it’s right there on her tag.
Relationships: Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun/Mark Lee, Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun/Mark Lee/Suh Youngho | Johnny, Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun/Suh Youngho | Johnny, Mark Lee/Suh Youngho | Johnny
Comments: 5
Kudos: 103





	rib line

He texts Johnny.

_you up?_

He stares at the screen. The screen stares back.

Jaehyun’s fingers vibrate when he’s already changed his mind because naturally. His blinks are heavy. His chain of thought’s loopy. There’s one good solution for that.

Can’t pussy out now, though. So, this is what they’re vibrating back:

 _matter of perspective._ (Jaehyun ignores the bunch of thinking emojis.) _currently undergoing liberation._

 _currently undergoing maintenance_ , Jaehyun shoots back, willing Johnny to get it and forget it, but instead—

_u know when u lose the whole fascism of the pants and everything’s nice and loose? like that_

_exactly like that_ , Jaehyun agrees.

_u up for some funny bizz?_

_down if you are_

_like a date?_

_sure_ , Jaehyun dismisses. _you’re paying_  
  


**

Johnny doesn’t pay but they haggle over the details and end up splitting it because the waitress just stands there, suffering. She looks like her head’s full of worms. 2:00 a.m. sharp, says the clock, and that’s about worm hour.

“It was a couple cake.”

“Real couples take turns,” Jaehyun says, scrolling his YouTube feed.

“Which I did, when was it… Just say you’re after my wallet.”

“You eat most of the thing, you pay for most of the thing.”

Johnny postures some more and tips double the usual, flirting the name out of the waitress. Jaehyun doesn’t point out it’s right there on her tag. Worms all around.

She thaws enough to slow down the traffic in this place—a feat—and takes a gander at Johnny’s spread legs.

Jaehyun tucks a video about loosening his back tension into the _Watch later_ folder.

Johnny’s saying all kinds of shit to her, sounds like it. They’re laughing, two blots on Jaehyun’s periphery.

It is kind of funny.  
  


**

American air turns Johnny into canned corn, verbal edition. His face gets so cartoonish, and suddenly he’s very James Dean about his interview persona, got an answer for everything.

Johnny transfers it to Mark and Mark then dances around Jaehyun like hot poultry, like it’s a ritual thing, a _Hey, catch this, bro._ They don’t point it out, but Jaehyun’s immune to it.

He’s not the one sore about it. In the hotel lobby, he watches Johnny and Mark congregate without him.

Maybe it’s because returning to America isn’t really a returning. He doesn’t even know what it means for him anymore. Other people seem to, that’s their idea of fun.

**

Whoever’s rooming with Mark, he won’t have the power of Peanut Butter Cups on his side.

Jaehyun does. They’re getting looser in the crook of his elbow, rustling in the ding that spits him out on the right floor. He feels like they sag a little when Mark stalls in the door like a hurdle.

Jaehyun isn’t interested in having to jump over him, the metaphor of it. He’s just here for the snacks.

“Thought we’d watch a movie,” Jaehyun says. “Or something. That thing on Netflix, you know…”

“Yeah, uh, actually, could you call Johnny?”

Jaehyun stares. Mark looks slightly more steamrolled than on his sociable days, but that’s why Jaehyun’s a whole two floors down.

“He’s not picking up, prolly ‘cause of the landline—I left my phone. But anyway, I ordered pizza, but they’re doing a shit job.”

There’s not even a cock nearby. Jaehyun’s not being blocked from anything, but hilariously, it’s a lot like that.

“You got it,” he says then, realizing Mark doesn’t have the guts to be pranking him. That feels worse. “No problem.”

**

Big Brother chokes their budget in the funniest of places. Feels like, oh, a game Jaehyun plays often, of proving shit to himself just because, only for the people above him.

The American Hot Wheels they pinball into and out of during morning show promotions isn’t multiple adult-friendly, Jesus. Jaehyun feels like a giant toddler, and getting in first is a bad move because there’s hundreds of them.

“Hold me, baby,” Johnny mocks, sounding like one.

“Come to my bosom, then, you pathetic wretch—”

—but not literally, fuck’s sake, which is what Johnny does. Drops an entire cargo of man in Jaehyun’s lap, no regard for the local law.

Johnny smells good.

“Doctor,” Jaehyun yelps.

“What’s your concern?” Mark pages in next, shouldering himself compact against Jaehyun.

“My legs. I can’t… feel my legs…”

“I hear you. Have you tried walking it off?”

Johnny spits a breathy laugh in Jaehyun’s face. His body goes lean and taut-shivery under Jaehyun’s hand, the good symptoms of having fun. His mouth sounds so full in shape when he talks. It’s a real giddy treat in close range.

Johnny suggests, his chin moving Jaehyun’s eyeline, “Have you tried wanking it off?”

“Lend a hand in times of need, good sir,” Jaehyun says.

Mark’s turn to splutter. _Yooooo, man. TMI._

TMI, bless him, like he hasn’t beat it knowing Jaehyun could hear from behind the wall. That one wasn’t bad, just inconvenient, and made Jaehyun think a lot. He remembers things, and when he can, he revists them.

When he can’t, he looks at them.  
  


**

There’s a song playing whose bass line sticks in Jaehyun’s stomach.

Mark raps along so Jaehyun wonders if he knows what he’s referencing. He asks about it. Mark shrugs.

“Johnny’s got ‘them BJL’s’,” Jaehyun says.

“Uh-huh?”

“You know. BJL’s.”

“He’s got what?” Mark asks casually, and Johnny starts listening.

“Lips.”

“I mean,” Mark doesn’t look Johnny’s way, but he’s bizarrely calm about it.

Jaehyun didn’t take them for illiterate on their home turf, but the way they’re both waiting now, looking at him, that was his mistake.

Blankly, Jaehyun puts a made-up dick in his mouth, knocking his cheek out plump with the head of his tongue once, twice. Now he only needs to wear a snapback backwards and have Mountain Dew listed as his drink of choice on fan-run profiles.

“Just stop, bro,” Mark scratches over his twitching mouth.

That’s the little-shit restraint if Jaehyun’s ever seen it.

Alright. He bites his tongue. He’ll remember this one, too.

Shame is a good thing, Jaehyun’s mom says. Mark doesn’t buy into that in the wildest of circumstances, which checks out with how very circumstantial his shame is.

“It’s a compliment,” Mark says when Johnny’s face can’t decide on anything and it’s getting lame. “Stating of the fact. No, really. That’s like saying on Thanksgiving you give thanks. You just do.”

Shyness looks so foreign on Johnny when he’s quiet about it. His eyes get sweet. He’d get like that back during Ennana, stuck in the face, and have Jaehyun desperately reaching for rib-ticklers because he was being threatened in front of an audience.

Mark takes it where he can’t, calling Johnny’s mouth a juicy kissy cushion, tipping him into a hilarious fit of lockjaw. The air clears up. Jaehyun starts laughing last because it’s not even that funny.  
  


**

What’s claustrophobic is that he minds it less and less how he morphs into a fungus at Mark’s side. He always realizes after Mark breaks off. This maths is proportional to other problems, like how many chuggings Jaehyun’s done that day divided by, say, how horny he feels.

“Alright, someone’s been workin’ out. Put me down, dude, put me down—”

Johnny hefts Mark higher on his back. Many oohs and an ounce of ah deadpan into each other. Mark makes a cute sound of terror. Mark calls Johnny _Hulk_ , then a fucking dick, and clutches on for dear life while elbowing his way to free speech.

He might be losing something in that, Jaehyun thinks, maybe a boundary.

That’s hysterical.  
  


**

The last taping knocks the wind out of him. Jaehyun’s knees do the bowlegged laminated paper thing. His sweat stache and armpits are worse for wear, and he gets a quick touch-up from the makeup artist before, like, someone sees.

He holds Johnny’s hand on the way back just to see how it feels to others in this climate. Some people, mostly the local fans, shit themselves. The try-on overseas PR manager gives it a look. The rest of the members zombie-walk past to the tune of cranky ten-minute naps. Mark lags a long inch behind.

Jaehyun holds the already-open car door for Johnny and instantly What-the-fucks himself stupid when Johnny gives him hell for it.

“A little quieter?” Taeyong says from the front.

“He means shut the fuck up, please,” Doyoung says, watching them from a slit between the headrests. Next to him, Mark puts his AirPods in.

“So cute when you’re being an asshole,” says Jaehyun sweetly.

Sweetly, ears burning.

And that’s the end of it until Johnny lets it just about rock to a calm standstill and opens his thighs into Jaehyun’s.

“Chivalry ain’t dead yet, huh?”

Johnny’s mouth curls like a frill from the side.  
  


**

Someone takes a messy jab at Taeyong that he laughs off, part of the joke, part of the laughs at his expense. He locks eyes with Jaehyun, who’s not laughing.

“Hyung—”

Mark ducks under Taeil’s swinging arm and then he’s very close. He bucks his hips sideways into Jaehyun, like they do when the mood is right. Jaehyun didn’t know he had more Mark habits.

“What’s up.”

“Hey,” Mark’s eyes are glassy. “Here.”

Jaehyun takes the can.

“Here,” Mark says again, forcing his thumb underneath the tab ring. He pops it just like that.

Eyebrows squiggling, Jaehyun cheers and slurps the pissy thing.

Mark rotates his shoulder like he does after practice and stretches his arm. Jaehyun welcomes it well around his shoulders. For someone so up his own ass about these things, Mark likes an unceremonious cuddle, right. And isn’t that nice.

He also smells like a misty shower, Jaehyun finds. It’s the good kind of sinking, bones gone.

“Personalized armchair,” Jaehyun praises.

“Oh, yeah? That come with holding hands as well, all around?”

“Asking nicely’s one way to queue up for it,” Jaehyun muses, but Mark takes him seriously.

“Nah, man, just teasing. You do what you like, you know?”  
  


**

It’s not enough just to know.

Over his Chop suey, he idly thinks about how handsome Mark is, especially when Mark pretends he’s oblivious to that very fact.

In the mornings, when Mark’s around in those ugly practice sweats, Jaehyun’s palms start to prick. That can’t be good. That shit’s likely so unwashed.

Mark swaps him some song recs. He swaps him for nothing because he wouldn’t leave a bro high and dry. It’s always, _Next time, dude, next time, we’ll see._ Jaehyun will totally be ready to belch out whatever new ballad Haechan circulates to him.

“This one, like, it’s got a lotta soul,” Mark says. His voice snaps like he’s a teen again. “Internally. Lemme find it.”

Jaehyun knows Korean makes Mark feel stiffer and English is the bendy friend, so he’s glad that they talk a lot that American way. It’s good practice, anyway, even better when Johnny watches from the outside.

Mark finds the song, lends Jaehyun a very clean AirPod. Mark’s diopters really are out there, old people level, but the framing kind of works.

He hates it when he gets used to something and then this happens.  
  


**

A week is too long between the last big thing and the next one. It feels like someone should be ogling them, so Jaehyun doesn’t let himself go too much.

On the slim chance he catches Taeyong, like, among people, he looks overheated. He isn’t even sure whether Doyoung still lives with them. He’s seen the takeout errand-boy’s mug so many times he’s starting to associate it with a smell.

Anything could happen. Boredom is a slow cooking. Jaehyun drags Johnny to cook with him.

“You’re squeezing my liver.”

“Quit bitching,” Jaehyun mumbles.

“Didn’t you say this’d be good?”

“Wanna watch some porn instead?”

Johnny looks like Jaehyun’s just suggested fucking to their own discography (his bad, then). Which they have yet to do. The fucking part, together.

He wonders when that’s going to come.

He also wonders, “Have you and Mark…?”

Squashing on one bed like this, it’s tectonic when Johnny decides to prop his chin. Right about now, he looks wise to all sorts of inner things or else, that air of something removed. He pinches Jaehyun’s cheek like he’s a good boy.

“Gonna be honest witchu,” he says as, on screen, Geralt squelches his sword through someone’s jaw, “I tried to make him watch it with me, and I failed. As a fellow millennial—”

“I’d really rather watch porn.”

**

“Yo,” Mark exhales through a mouthful that clings, “this is the real deal. Seriously.”

“Isn’t it,” Johnny says.

“It’s spread so evenly?”

“Actually, the ratio matters less than your wrist technique. You gotta flick it.”

“I had no idea you mastered even the regional American cuisine,” Jaehyun says. His throat is sticky. “Bravo.”

“Thank you, thank you,” Johnny takes another bite of his PBJ.

Not bad, for camping in a hotel room. It might’ve been different if he’d stayed over at Johnny’s house.

He did get an invitation, but he’s got a thing about his own space. He didn’t think Johnny would understand that right, so he just let the implication of being gentlemanly into the ether. Not that Doyoung cared.

Not that Johnny seemed to, either.

More importantly, Johnny has made them bland PBJ’s to cope with the fallout of life losing its spice. Every stage is like that. Chicago was like that especially, sentimental to Jaehyun from a distance, and hit dear Johnny here with an extra-hefty brick.

It’s amazing. Jaehyun’s never eaten sand until now.

“Dude, just imagine eating this with a knife and fork,” Mark licks his fingers. “Royal.”

“Mark,” Johnny says, “even kings ate with their hands.”

“The worst thing is they didn’t have soap back then,” says Jaehyun.

“Only cholera,” Johnny confirms.

Mark laughs, teeth out, slapping his knee a little bit.

“Compliments to the chef,” Jaehyun says.

“Thanks, man,” Mark agrees, and then he pays them.

He pecks Johnny sweetly, so fast it’s almost a blur. Jaehyun watches how Johnny’s mouth pulls and catches up.

Jaehyun’s blinks slow down.

Johnny turns into a cocksure bastard when you work him right. Sometimes he’s waiting for it. A lot of the time he’s the one working you, Jaehyun can tell.

So it’s quite heroic of Johnny to try to reverse-engineer his look down at Mark into studious and all, but Mark kisses him again, reeling himself in by Johnny’s hoodie until it tugs down over Johnny’s eyes. Jaehyun snorts. Mark wiggles a little, the way he does when he gets goosebumps.

Mark’s eyes don’t close, but Johnny can’t say the same. Mark watches his mouth, trading little kisses out of laziness or science, licking under Johnny’s lip, which unlocks Johnny’s handsy instincts.

Jaehyun melts slowly, at a drip. He spreads his body out, feeling the inseam of his jeans. To Johnny’s displeasure, he clears his throat.

Hey. He’s just a man.

“I watch you guys sometimes,” Mark says matter-of-factly. “Not, like, in a weird way, or anything. Just to get a feel.”

Maybe it’s time Jaehyun started filtering his output with the cameras turned off, too. Depending. A million little things that should be just his come to his mind, most of which he knows he wouldn’t share.

“I’m gonna kiss you now,” Mark manifests in the couch trench.

“Okay, dumbass.”

Mark goes to pinch his cheek with his knuckles like Jaehyun hasn’t seen it happen enough to prevent it. And he does.

“What’s up,” Mark says sardonically, glasses askew.

When he leans close, Jaehyun feels that hungover feeling. The room wobbles a little so he reminds himself of basic physics and matter behavior.

Mark’s mouth sticks nicely. He has a mole on his cheek and hard thighs that he straddles Jaehyun with, so rough with it he bumps Jaehyun’s nose. He breathes a sorry. He arches when Jaehyun feels up the heat map of where Johnny’s hands went, getting hard just thinking.

Mark licks into his mouth, gentle, wet. Tastes like nuts.

Thinking.

“C’mere,” he says.

And Johnny’s on it like a charm. The couch sinks into the black hole of his weight, tipping Jaehyun a little.

Jaehyun tenses to ridges under Mark’s slithering hand. Mark strums underneath his shirt, circles his belly button, drags up to his chest. They smack apart. More cautious, Jaehyun wonders what else he’s letting show now.

Mark’s eyes are a comical bling from behind his glasses. Hooking his tongue out toward Jaehyun’s mouth, he changes his mind at the last second and turns his head into Johnny’s hand.

It grips his jaw. Johnny’s breathing is at odds with the sloppy tastes he gives Mark’s mouth. Johnny’s free hand swallows Jaehyun’s and rubs its palm over his cock, presses it there.

“Aw,” Jaehyun says, not staying for long.

He fingers over Mark’s uneven ice maker abs. No happy trail there. Mark exhales over Johnny’s nose when Jaehyun starts jerking him off dry, bucking out of rhythm.

“Jaehyunnie so,” Mark snickers, “cute when he makes sounds.”

“I’ll leave you like this.”

Mark murmurs that he can’t come from a handjob, anyway. Not with that attitude, Jaehyun bets.

“Why,” Johnny polemizes, “you give yourself handjobs all the time, Mark.”

Mark grumbles something ripe into Jaehyun’s ear, grinding down.

“Come again?” Johnny asks.

“I would _love_ to, actually—”

“If you want something done right,” Jaehyun warns, but Johnny’s quick to say he’ll blow Mark.

Like, for free.

Pink like the inside of his mouth, head full of those wet cock-sucking thoughts, Mark pretends to be cool. He says that well, yeah, that might work.

**

It works for that moment, but otherwise it damages the pecking order he projects, of how things should be. That must be why Johnny has started looking at him like he knows Jaehyun now. 

That must be why Johnny takes him by the hand when they’re crossing the road like he’s an Alabamian granny. Johnny does it with deadpan security guard gusto that hits Jaehyun in a ticklish spot. 

He counts the traffic light seconds by batches of the canary cabs. New York is so spiky and benchpressingly futuristic. All the members go out to have pizza while standing, the heavy NY breed that makes you shit on cue.

Jaehyun watches Mark’s mouth, orange with pizza grease.

“…‘nother level,” Mark’s mouth is smacking. He licks his teeth. “You wanna bite?”

Jaehyun opens his mouth wide and smiles into the camera lens.

**Author's Note:**

> [cheerz](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIVEAQfbI5w)


End file.
